March 2004

I’ve been collecting technical snippets about There since I joined last November, and I’m sure a lot of other people have their own private collection. More recently, I’ve been organising the information I have and combining it with contributions from other people to build a There Technical Wiki.

For the moment, the Wiki is publicly readable but only editable by people with edit passwords. I’m very open to handing out editing passwords to anyone who wants to contribute, though, so please get in touch with me if you want to get involved. If you just have some useful information but don’t want to go through the hassle of organising it and getting registered, just e-mailing it to me or sticking it on as a comment to this entry will work fine.

I’m feeling smug again, as my second design for There was accepted today and is now in auctions. This one is a banner painter object designed for a very specific place in There, which is to say the Oasis Camel Trading Company near Sirocco. The wrinkled sacking background gives a kind of disreputable feel to it that I’m quite pleased with.

I have just listed my first designer item for sale in There auctions. This is a freestanding picture object for use in a house or zone. It is based on a photograph of mine that I previously used for my 2003 Christmas card in the real world.

Monochrome work in There turns out to be harder than you’d expect, because most places in the world have environmental lighting with a strong colour cast. This doesn’t matter much for colour artwork because the human eye is good at compensating; for monochrome, though, it can produce very ugly effects. My solution to this has been to arrange for the picture and frame textures (but not the ones on the back) to be “unlit” and thus retain their neutral colour and brightness wherever the object is placed. The down-side of this is that the picture glows in the dark, but that seemed like the right tradeoff.

The basic frame model is by Kirmeo, and is one of the free models available from the There Museum of Art. I’ll be donating a copy of the picture to the TMOA’s collection.

The image (click on thumbnail for larger version) shows me looking insufferably smug at getting my first design acceptance.

This a multiple exposure picture of Mr47, whose avatar has been walking that same 20-foot path for at least the last several hours, since before the last system downtime. Every few seconds, he gets rubber-banded back to the steps of the Beachcomber Emporium. Is he the Ghost of Karuna Plaza?

The second image shows what he is wearing (click on either image for a larger version). Coincidence? You decide.

[Updated 20040312: added additional object texture fixes]

V2.03 of There was released as an in-place update on the 10th. The model used for the Gothic Group Seating changed again, apparently breaking all the Gothic Group Seating even worse than the problem seen in V2.0.

The good news is that this time the texture problem seems to be a simple matter of the updater not removing the old broken configuration files. If you log out from There, delete the appropriate files yourself and log back in, everything will magically return to normal. Presumably, this will happen automatically in another few days when There release their next update. In the meantime, if you are desperate to see your Ladie_Di Palm and Hiero seating, locate your There client’s Resources\gamekit\epobs\fu directory and delete the following files:

• Ladie_Di Palm seating: 71551021.ts
• Ladie_Di Hiero seating: 71552241.ts

The bad news is that if you pick up a designer gothic group seating object and put it back down, it floats above the surface you tried to place it on. I’m guessing this is a broken model file, but for the moment the suggestion would have to be not to move your furniture around if you can help it.

Fixes for some additional objects also involve deleting appropriate files (this time in Resources\gamekit\epobs\converted) and logging in again:

• marisa9 beer 2: 1037408.ts
• Randra_Loqqet hammock: 1037460.ts

The cliff houses above the Oasis have gone now, and building has moved instead to the top of the hill, an area I’m calling Folly Ridge. There are some interesting buildings up on the ridge including a Roman folly, one of tempest’s castles and a couple of Moroccan palaces. In the middle is Leran’s Folly Springs portazone, pictured above.

This zone was built with aztec3’s help, and uses his pool object as its central feature. The large green boulders are recent designs by Arepera. The smaller round boulders are seating, and another 5-seater group seating object is concealed within the pool itself. This is a lovely place to just sit and read the newspaper or chat with friends.